Balancing Development & User Experience Design | iContact

Put a group of designers and developers together on a project, and you'll quickly find more than a handful of areas where they don't see eye to eye. Designers want too much, too fast, and are too persnickety about each little pixel. And they think they know everything. Developers want too much, too fast, and are too black and white to understand what makes a design special. And they think they know everything.

But a good designer knows he or she needs a great developer. And a good developer knows he or she needs a great designer. At least, if any of them want to produce anything worthwhile.

The trick is basing that working relationship on collaboration, and playing to each others' strengths. At iContact, our User Experience team gathers user needs and business goals and, in collaboration with developers and other stakeholders, takes the lead in developing early-stage plans. We call them napkin sketches. Those simple, straightforward documents are shared with our developers for very early feedback, getting everyone on the same page, and kicking off a process of constant refinement.

From there, we sharpen the design to wireframes and comps, iterating on feedback (and user testing) all the way. And since most of our designs represent long-term goals, we break them up into manageable pieces, again, relying heavily on our developers to tell us what can be done, and when, and what pieces come first. The best moments are when a developer has a great design epiphany, or when a designer comes up with a really clever, sometimes crazy way to solve a development roadblock.

We disagree. We debate. We do unspeakable things to whiteboards, sussing out the right decisions. But we're proud of the true partnership our developers and our designers have forged, leading us to tools like MessageBuilder and MessageCoder — some of the most powerful, most capable, most comfortable-to-use tools in the industry.